Earlier today, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on “legal issues regarding military commissions and the trial of detainees for violations of the law of war” (archived webcast here). At that hearing, Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson supported the notion of “prolonged detention.” He noted that “as a matter of legal authority”– citing the “laws of …

A previous post discussed the recent option by Judge John D. Bates in Hamlily v. Obama. In that case, Judge Bates set forth a standard for presidential detention authority. On Thursday, Federal District Court Judge Royce Lamberth adopted Judge Bates’s approach. In Mattan v. Obama, Judge Lamberth explained:
The Court reaches the same conclusion, and for the same …

As is now quite well known, on April 2nd, Federal District Judge John D. Bates issued a landmark opinion on the scope of habeas corpus in Maqaleh v. Gates. Faced with the question of whether the right of habeas should be extended to four persons detained by the United States at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, Bates ruled that three out …

From Rep. Nadler’s press release:
Congressman Jerrold Nadler (NY-08), Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, along with Reps. Jeff Flake (AZ-06), William Delahunt (MA-10) and Ron Paul (TX-14), today reintroduced the National Security Letters Reform Act of 2009, a bipartisan bill designed to provide crucial checks against the overreaching and dangerous National Security …

In case you missed it, former US Ambassador for the United Nations, Thomas R. Pickering, and former FBI Director, William S. Sessions, had an op ed in Monday’s Washington Post arguing in favor of the creation of a presidential commission to investigate the behavior of American officials in the post-9/11 world. They explain:
America needs President Obama to name a nonpartisan …

A previous post discussed the Obama Administration’s recent memo in which it articulatated a new approach to detention. Harvard professor Noah Feldman has an op ed in the New York Times discussing the memo. Feldman explains:
Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.
Perhaps …

In a memo filed today with US District Court Judge John D. Bates, the Justice Department set forth its legal basis for detaining persons associated with terrorism and abandoned the use of the term “enemy combatant.” The memo can be found here. The memo states the new framework for detention as follows:
The President has the authority to detain persons that …